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Lisbon, Munich, April 20th, 2018. EDP is preparing its retail business for the digital future. While the energy industry is becoming increasingly decentralized – with solar PV, battery storage and the uptake of electric vehicles – future utility companies will have to turn themselves into digital service providers. Just like in other industries where digitization disrupted existing business models, the main asset of a utility will be the end customer who owns the solar PV or the electric vehicle.

To meet this challenge, EDP is turning itself into a data-driven service provider that continuously offers new and innovative services focused on the end customer. As an enabling foundation for these services, EDP is leveraging GreenCom Networks’ Energy Information Brokerage Platform. “Digital technology helps us to be faster and more innovative in our services which we offer to our customers. GreenCom Networks is providing us with a leading-edge technology platform that realizes the Energy Internet of Things and enables us to create new products and services for our customers rapidly” says Marta Diaz from EDP Spain.

“EDP is one of the global leaders in the utility industry. We are proud to be a partner to support EdP in utilizing the opportunities of the digital energy future”, comments Christian Feisst, CEO of GreenCom Networks. Romain Trigance, GreenComs’ technical lead for the EDP project, adds: “We have worked with many energy companies. But partnering with EDP is exciting given the size of its customer base and the aspiration of becoming a true innovation leader. With EDP, we can prove the strengths of our technology”.

The partnership between EDP and GreenCom Networks is one of the outcomes of the Free Electrons initiative that EDP established together with seven other international utilities. Out of more than 450 applicants, twelve innovative start-up companies were selected to work on future business models in the energy industry. GreenCom Networks was one of the companies that participated in the Free Electrons program. “This collaboration with GreenCom Networks demonstrates the benefits of our commitment towards innovation and collaboration with start-ups that we are driving forward with initiatives like Free Electrons,” says Luis Manuel, GM of EDP Innovation and one of the founders of the Free Electrons program.

About EDP
EDP is an energy producer, distributor and retailer with 12 million customers in Portugal, Spain and Brazil. EDP has over 25GW of power production capacity of which 5GW are hydro and 10GW are wind, making it the 4th largest wind power producer in the world and 3rd in the US. Its renewable power business is present in 14 countries including the US and Brazil.

Munich, Sophia Antipolis, April 16th, 2018. GreenCom Networks received funding with the Macdoch Group as lead investor and with a participation of its current shareholders Munich Venture Partners and SET Ventures. The money will be used to further strengthen GreenCom’s leading position as an Energy Internet of Things (IoT) provider in the European energy market and beyond.

GreenCom is providing its Energy Information Brokerage Platform to utilities and energy service companies, including OEMs of energy-relevant devices. As a company, GreenCom combines unique strengths from a deep understanding of the future energy markets and its telco technology background with the experience of managing millions of devices connected to an Energy IoT.

By utilizing GreenCom’s platform, customers may offer new digital energy services to their residential customer base. As the energy industry is facing a significant shift from oil and gas towards electricity and from central power generation towards distributed generation, battery storage, and electric vehicles, intelligent software is essential to enable a smart and sustainable future energy supply. With its end-to-end Energy IoT offering, GreenCom integrates distributed assets like solar inverters, heat pumps, battery storage or electric vehicles from a large variety of vendors to enable such new digital energy services.

GreenCom’s Energy Information Brokerage Platform is using artificial intelligence to predict the behavior of connected assets and to optimize their usage. Depending on the services GreenCom’s customers are offering, the platform supports local or central optimization, e.g., within GreenCom’s virtual power plant application. Just recently, GreenCom announced its offering of an energy community engine that allows customers to connect with each other virtually.

“Macdoch is not just a financial investor for us. The Macdoch Group has excellent relationships in the Australian market. And that’s a very interesting one that we are actively looking at,” commented Christian Feisst, CEO of GreenCom.

“GreenCom has a unique offering that paves the way for the future energy transition. We invested because we recognize the company’s unique capabilities and we see significant synergies with our other business activities,” said John Thorpe, Director Macdoch UK.

About The Macdoch Group

Macdoch is a family-controlled investment group with executives based in Sydney and London. Its interests span quoted equities, venture capital, agriculture and property mainly in the UK and Australia. Macdoch invests in a number of areas with a particular focus on the energy and healthcare sectors.

GreenCom open-innovation lab as a blueprint for the digital energy future

Companies can access live data and test their own innovative products, such as flat rates and communities

Reduction in energy costs by up to 20 percent, stabilization of networks and reduction in CO2 footprint

Munich, Sophia-Antipolis, 6th February 2018. The energy transition presents great challenges for the industry. The proportion of renewable energies is increasing. However, electricity generated using wind turbines and solar panels is not as easy to regulate as a power station. Network operators are thus investing billions in stabilizing the electricity grids. GreenCom Networks, a German-French platform provider for Energy-Services based in Munich and at Institut Universitaire de Technologie Sophia-Antipolis, is now offering a solution. That allows fluctuations to be reduced thanks to a digital control system and also helps energy companies to optimize their own procurement. The company is offering the industry an energy community in the form of what is known as an open-innovation lab with live data from real end customers. In this way, electric cars, PV systems, heat pumps, and other electrical equipment can, for instance, be linked to each other at the GreenCom Networks sites in Germany and France.

GreenCom CEO Dr. Christian Feißt: “With the GreenCom energy community, we offer companies access to a proven test lab so that new products and services can be developed for the energy sector. Companies have hardly any opportunity to obtain real data, systems, and product examples. This hampers product development. We want to close this gap with our open-innovation lab.” The extensive data material for the development and optimization of companies’ own business models is provided in an anonymized form.

Screenshot of GreenCom’s open innovation lab.

The GreenCom energy community is probably the very first open-innovation lab that can actually integrate and control various equipment from different major manufacturers, such as PV systems, battery storage devices, heat pumps, and electric cars. Successful services, such as Germany’s first green electricity flat rate and flexible electricity tariffs, have already been developed on this basis.

The open-innovation lab is intended to be a “living blueprint” for how energy is produced, used and traded in the future. Real use cases provide specific data and knowledge: “The aim of the GreenCom living lab is to verify compatibility and performance in a real test environment,” says Dr. Feißt. The challenge mainly lies in linking up various producers, different types of equipment and individual households while also ensuring a reliable supply and full flexibility for all those involved.

Thanks to the intelligent control system, approx. 20% of energy costs can be saved in the GreenCom energy community. What’s more, in this way, the local power consumption of electronic devices is significantly increased, and CO2 is reduced by switching consumption to green electricity times. As a result, the intelligent control system also ensures that the stabilization costs in the electricity grid are considerably reduced.

GreenCom Networks expands its business to the United States. The German-French Energy IoT platform provider will offer its platform for residential decentralized energy resources management systems (DERMS) to OEMs and utilities as a white label solution. The starting point for the US market-entry will be the DistribuTECH in San Antonio, Texas. Visitors may test a live demo themselves from the 23rd to the 25th of January at the GreenCom Networks booth #1555.

After successful engagements with customers in Europe GreenCom Networks offers its platform in the US, aiming for utilities and manufacturers as customers. Furthermore, GreenCom Networks benefits from experiences gathered in Europe: “We already made essential experiences in the area of residential DERMS with different OEMs and utilities in Europe,” says Dr. Christian Feisst, CEO of GreenCom Networks. “Therefore, we are confident to best support the growing demand for residential DERMS solutions in the US market.“

Ewald Woste, longstanding board member of numerous utilities in Germany, will strengthen the supervisory board of GreenCom Networks AG, Munich. The company that was only founded six years ago sets course for further strong growth with this prominent support. “GreenCom Networks provides innovative digital solutions for the energy transition based on Internet of Things technology”, says Woste. “In a digital world data, its analysis and processing becomes the raw material of the new energy world. Therefore, I am delighted to support GreenCom Networks on its successful growth path.”

Ewald Woste will support GreenCom Networks with his valuable experience in the energy market. Photo: GreenCom Networks.

For Dr. Christian Feißt, CEO of GreenCom Networks, the entry of Ewald Woste into the supervisory board is a milestone. “We are immensely proud to have won the former president of the German utility association BDEW for this function. As a former board member at Mainova and Thüga and as a member of the supervisory board of large utilities like E.ON or GASAG, Ewald Woste provides a know-how that is rarely found in Germany. He knows what is needed to transform the energy market by investing into digitization. With him in our supervisory board, we will also be able to intensify our collaboration with international customers.”

GreenCom Networks was founded in 2011 as a software provider for digitizing the energy world. Its headquarter is located in Munich, Germany, and a development center is situated at the high-tech-site Sophie Antipolis, France. As a platform provider, GreenCom Networks enables the integration and optimized usage of solar PV, battery storages, heat pumps or electric vehicles. This digital integration enables new, service-oriented business models like power, heat or mobility flat-rates, energy communities or peer-to-peer energy models.

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About Ewald Woste:

Ewald Woste, 57, has more than 25 years of experience in the German energy business. Currently, he is an advisor to EQT, a Swedish private equity investor, and the Australian bank Macquarie. He is head of or member of several supervisory boards in Germany and Austria, such as E.ON, GASAG, Thüringer Energie AG or Energie Steiermark AG.